We live in times in which hope is a rare
commodity. That is why someone like Pierre Sauvage is such a valuable
resource. [He] is a purveyor of hope, of faith in the better instincts of
human beings. Judging from the footage he has completed so far, Sauvage
has another inspiring effort on his hands. George Robinson, The
Jewish Week

But first...

We said we didn't know.
We said we couldn't have done anything even if we had known.

Peter Bergson, a militant Jew from
Palestine,
led a controversial American effort to fight the Holocaust.

This is his testimony.

In Not Idly By, documentary filmmaker Pierre Sauvage (Weapons of the Spirit), himself a child survivor of the Holocaust, provides a forceful contribution to our understanding of the American reaction to the Holocaust—and the American Jewish response.

A Palestinian Jew who had served with the nationalist Irgun organization in pre-Israel Palestine, Peter Bergson (born Hillel Kook, 1915-2001) had come to the U.S. in 1940. In America, this firebrand went on to lead what came to be known as the Bergson Group, whose strenusous efforts from 1942 to 1945 underscore just how much known at the time—and how must was attempted during those difficult years.

Sometimes vilified at the time, Bergson remains a controversial yet relatively obscure figure in the history of America and the Holocaust.

The only documentary to draw on both of the existing filmed interviews with Bergson, Not Idly By provides the challenging first-hand testimony of the charismatic and eloquent Bergson, who comments scathingly on the response to the crisis by American Jewish leaders, and described his group's determined efforts to fight the Holocaust. This notably included the fiery 1943 production We Will Never Die by Ben Hecht and Kurt Weill, presented extensively for the first time in this documentary.

"We lost the war in Europe," Bergson insists, referring to the war against the Jews that was occurring at the same time as World War II. "You couldn't have stopped the massacre—you could have slowed the massacre, you could have made it an inefficient massacre."

Yes, this is a one-side view of those times: Peter Bergson's. Isn't it about time we gave further thought to that side? Do we not need to face our share of responsibility for what happened to the Jews of Europe?

"In
all we saved some two thousand human beings.We ought to have saved many times that number.

But we did what we could."

Varian Fry

Viewed within the context of its times, Fry's mission
in Marseille, France, in 1940-41 seems not
"merely" an
attempt to save some threatened writers, artists, and political figures. It appears in hindsight like a doomed final quest to reverse the very
direction in which the world—and not merely the Nazis—was heading.

In a challenging time, Varian
Fry, Miriam Davenport Ebel, Mary Jayne Gold, Charles Fawcett, Leon
Ball and Hiram Bingham IV, were Americans who joined with others in
the U.S. and in Marseille, France, to further brotherhood from sea to shining
sea...

We believe that at least seven non-Jews
who worked with Varian Fry in Marseille would be worthy of joining
Varian Fry as Righteous Among the Nations, a distinction granted by Israel's Yad Vashem
memorial:

Leon F.
Ball, USA

Daniel
Bénédite, France

Hiram
Bingham IV, USA

Miriam
Davenport Ebel, USA

Charles
Fawcett, USA

Jean Gemähling,
France

Mary
Jayne Gold, USA

In February 1941, in Marseille,France, an American wrote to his wife back in New York:

Among the people who have come into my office, or
with whom I am in constant correspondence, are not only some of the greatest
living authors, painters, sculptors of Europe . . . but also former cabinet
ministers and even prime ministers of half a dozen countries. What a
strange place Europe is when men like this are reduced to waiting patiently
in the anteroom of a young American of no importance whatever.

Varian Fry, the young American, was 32 when he
arrived in Marseille early in the morning of Aug. 14, 1940—only two months
after France's traumatizing defeat by the Nazis,
and a full year and a half before Americans finally allowed themselves to
get dragged into the war.

In that summer of 1940, high-level Nazis were
talking among themselves about the need for a final solution to the Jewish
question, but there is no evidence that anybody was seriously thinking of
mass murder. Throughout the coming year, the German policy would
remain one of emigration and resettlement.

What was possible when Fry arrived in Europe would,
however, no longer be possible by the time Fry left Europe at the end of
October 1941. By then, it wouldn’t only be the doors of the U. S. and
other Western countries that were largely closed to refugees; the doors of
departure from Europe would be shut too, and the Final Solution would be
underway.

These are the circumstances in which a New
York intellectual led what we know to have been the most
determined and successful private American rescue operation during World War
II. At a time of tragic American apathy about the refugee crisis in
Europe, Varian Fry was assisted locally in his struggle by other singular
and similarly non-Jewish Americans: the late Miriam Davenport Ebel,
Mary Jayne Gold, Charles Fawcett,
and Leon Ball, as well as the late
righteous consul Hiram Bingham IV.

Banding together with Jewish and non-Jewish refugees
from the Third Reich, as well as early French opponents to Vichy, this tiny
group, with erratic assistance from colleagues in New York
,
may have helped to save as many as 2,000
people: Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz, Heinrich Mann, Franz
Werfel, Alma Mahler Werfel, André Breton, Victor Serge, André Masson, Lion
Feuchtwanger, Konrad Heiden, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Arendt,
Max Ophuls, Walter Mehring, Jean Malaquais, Valeriu Marcu, Remedios Varo,
Otto Meyerhof… The list—Fry’s list—goes on and on.

“There is a fire sale on brains going on here, and
we aren’t taking full advantage of it,” an American official in
Lisbon told Fry in August 1940, long before the Holocaust became
established as a metaphor.
Even if many of the names on Fry’s list have faded into relative obscurity,
the list as a whole represents much of the intelligentsia of Europe at that
time; the population shifts Fry helped produce would have major
ramifications for American culture.

Though Fry was not specifically concerned with
saving Jews—and indeed the German and Austrian anti-Nazi émigrés in France
then seemed the most vulnerable of all, whether Jewish or not—Fry became in
1998 the first American singled out to be honored as a Righteous Among the Nations by
Israel’s Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem memorial to the Holocaust.

Many basic facts about the man and his mission are
still unfamiliar even to scholars, while some of
what is “known” is in fact erroneous or misleading. Furthermore, there
have been no attempts as yet to place the rescue effort in its full historical
context.

Filling some of these gaps and drawing on extensive
research and over one hundred and fifty interviews conducted for the author’s upcoming
feature documentary, And Crown Thy Good: Varian Fry in Marseille, this account of the mission will lead naturally enough to some
fundamental questions about what we are to make of it, what still remains
unknown, and whether the story is more than a mere footnote, however
culturally significant, in the history of the Holocaust.

Varian's War,
2001 Showtime movie, which
purported to be about Varian Fry

Smithsonian magazine, March 2009: Bingham's ListThis article, beginning with its misleading title, does not serve
the memory of a good mana letter to the editor was sent by Annette Riley Fry, Sylvia Fry-Severino,
and Pierre Sauvage [pending]

World War II magazine, March 2008: Rescue Mission to Vichy:
American Varian Fry saved a generation of France's greatest artists from
the Nazis